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Throughout the nineteenth century, federal Indian policy oscillated between two extreme positions: assimilation versus isolation. While scholars have often been interested in the impact of past federal policy on current levels of economic development among American Indian tribes, none have explicitly examined the influence of federal assimilation policy on long-run economic development. In this paper, I take advantage of tribal-level variation in the application of federal policies to estimate the effect of assimilation on long-run economic performance. To quantify the impact of such policies, I introduce a novel measure of cultural assimilation: the prevalence of traditional indigenous names relative to common American first names. To calculate the distribution of name types, I have gathered the names and locations for all American Indians enumerated in the 1900 United States census. After classifying each name, I calculated the reservation-specific share of non-indigenous names. I estimate the relationship between cultural assimilation in 1900 and per capita income from 1970 through 2020. I find that historical levels of assimilation are consistently associated with higher levels of per capita income in all census years. The results are robust to the inclusion of a variety of cultural and institutional controls and regional fixed effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The African Growth Opportunity Act (AGOA) has been a crucial trade and development initiative, offering preferential access to qualified Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries to the United States market since its enactment in 2000. This paper presents a comprehensive review of scholarly articles and policy reports that analyze the impact of AGOA on the economic performance of SSA countries. Employing various econometric methods and data analysis techniques, researchers have investigated the effects of AGOA on trade flows, foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows, employment, economic growth, and poverty levels. The findings reveal that AGOA has positively affected the region's trade, particularly in apparel, textiles, and agriculture. However, its influence on promoting export diversification and attracting FDI is nuanced, with substantial heterogeneity among the beneficiary countries and industries within each country. While some SSA countries have experienced substantial export growth and FDI inflows, others have not fully leveraged the benefits of AGOA due to absorptive capacity constraints and governance challenges. AGOA's effectiveness in promoting broad-based employment, GDP growth, and poverty reduction remains an active area of inquiry, necessitating further research to understand the policy's sustained impact and inform future trade policy designs for SSA countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces a special issue of the Journal of Economic and Social Measurement on U.S. Regional Economic Indicator Models. It describes recent research on such models, both specifically and in the context of general research on economic indicators, and provides some references. The six papers of this special issue represent a selection from the papers presented at a conference held in Braga, Portugal at the Universidad do Minho 7-10 June 1998, a purpose of which was to bring together scholars from Europe, North America, and South America to consider issues in the construction of indicator models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we explore how satellite images of global night lights from year 1992 to 2003 can be used to estimate economic activity at the sub-regional level in the US and China. The night lights based estimates of economic activity are then spatially analysed and compared with subregional economic indicators where available for selected years. We also briefly discuss two theoretical models that shed light on the geospatial patterns reflected by the night light data. The results are presented with a series of maps, charts and tables. Resumen. En este artículo exploramos el uso potencial de imágenes de satélite de la iluminación nocturna global desde 1992 a 2003 para estimar la actividad económica a escala subregional en los EE.UU. y en China. A continuación se analizan espacialmente las estimaciones de la actividad económica basadas en la iluminación nocturna y se comparan con los indicadores económicos subregionales disponibles para los años del estudio. Discutimos también brevemente dos modelos teoréticos que podrían ilustrar los patrones geoespaciales que reflejan los datos de iluminación nocturna. Los resultados se presentan junto con una serie de mapas, gráficos y cuadros. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The composition of economic growth can be analyzed in two different ways. In the ‘traditional method’ for the decomposition of GDP growth, total imports are deducted from exports. This approach underestimates the importance of exports for the growth in GDP, and overestimates the importance of domestic expenditure categories. In the alternative methodology proposed in this paper, imports are allocated to all expenditure categories. Although this ‘import-adjusted method’ is more complex than the ‘traditional method’, it has the considerable advantage that the contributions of the expenditure categories to GDP growth provide a better understanding of why GDP growth decelerates or accelerates. The methodology and data requirements for calculating the import content of final demand, and the implications for the decomposition of real GDP growth, are discussed. For six European countries and the United States, the paper shows that applying the alternative methodology provides rather a different economic story. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a recent issue of this journal, Beil et al. (2005, hereafter, BFJ) examined the relationship between telecommunications investment and economic growth in the United States over the period 1947-1996. Based on results from Granger-Sims test, BFJ conclude that '... investment by telecommunications firms is caused by, but does not cause, economic activity, and the findings are robust across lag lengths'. However, using another version of the Granger causality test due to Toda & Yamamoto (1995) and the same data set transformed into natural logarithms, the evidence in this paper indicates a feedback where there was a bi-directional causality between telecommunications investment and economic growth. This seems to suggest that policies aimed at stimulating the US economy by accelerating investment in the telecommunications sector may be successful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a comment on the paper "America's Historical Experience with Low Inflation." The author notes that while he agrees with much of the argument in the paper; however, he does not find it persuasive. He sets forth several instances that would cause the U.S. to be presented with rising inflation other than becoming involved in a war. One situation would be if the unemployment rate were to rise. The author suggests that the U.S. cannot become complacent and assume that a low-inflation environment will continue to thrive.

This paper presents evidence of a non-linear relationship between real GDP growth and oil price changes for the US economy. We also argue that this non-linearity is not merely due to the use of data from the mid-1980s onwards, as most authors, so far, seem to believe. In fact, we find the existence of non-linearity with the use of data earlier than 1984, and even before 1977. Furthermore, we question that the non-linear transformations of oil prices proposed in the literature are the most appropriate ones for reflecting such non-linearity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Targeting industry clusters for economic development has become popular despite the lack of empirical evidence about the spatial scales over which various clusters agglomerate. This paper identifies twenty manufacturing industry clusters from a principal components analysis of interindustry patterns of trade and measures the spatial employment concentration of each cluster's plants within a polycentric framework. Two to eight centers of employment concentration are detected within the Southern California region for each set of trade linkages. Our spatial half-life measure reveals that half of a cluster's employment in associated establishments is located within a typical range of eight to twelve kilometers (about 5–7.5 miles) to the nearest employment center or subcenter for the particular cluster. Furthermore, employment in seventeen of the twenty clusters is found to be more spatially concentrated than manufacturing employment as a whole, suggesting that geographic proximity is important to interindustry linkages in the Southern California economy. More important, the spatial concentration across industry clusters varies considerably within the metropolitan area, implying that economic development practitioners should consider local context and adapt industry cluster theories to the specific advantages and disadvantages of their immediate locality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Late 1990s claims of a shift toward a new economy in the United States and other developed economies were said to accelerate earlier trends reducing the material content of production. The shift toward a postindustrial services economy is said to have been accentuated by application of new information and communications technologies, dramatically reducing the material content of production. This offers the possibility for continuous economic expansion unconstrained by resources supply. This paper provides a critical analysis of these trends in relation to resource use by developed economies. It shows that trends toward a lower material content of production are occurring, and this has led to poor demand conditions for primary producers. Nevertheless, these trends fall well short of eliminating Western economies’ dependence on key resources. This paper shows the changing role of resources in economic activity among developed economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses an index to measure the level of employment diversity at the state level of two periods spanning two decades. The index is based on aggregating employment at eight major sectors. The findings indicate a movement toward more specialization in the latter period (2000) as compared to an earlier period (1970s). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Eight times a year, approximately two weeks before every FOMC meeting, the Federal Reserve releases a description of economic conditions in the twelve Federal Reserve districts. Called the Beige Book, this description relies primarily on surveys and anecdotal evidence gathered by the twelve district banks. For this paper, we read and numerically scored past Beige Books in order to determine the extent to which the descriptions in these books accurately reflect current economic activity as measured by quarterly real GDP growth. We find that both in-sample and out-of-sample, the quantitative Beige Book indices do have significant predictive content for current and next quarter real GDP growth. Furthermore, the Beige Book has information about current quarter real GDP growth not present in other indicators such as the Blue Chip Consensus Forecast or time series models that use real-time data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This articles presents an overview of the manufacturing activity during an economic recovery in the U.S. in the 1980s. The economic expansion that started at the end of 1982 has shown surpassing strength and is already longer than the postwar average for length of recovery. Despite the improvement in incomes and employment during this recovery, there is a general feeling that the manufacturing sector has not participated in the growth. This in part reflects the widely publicized problems of a number of major manufacturing industries due in large part to a strong dollar that has led to rapid imports. The rise in economic activity in this recovery has been accompanied by a strong increase in manufacturing output as shown by the Federal Reserve's index of manufacturing, which is probably the best measure of output available. While manufacturing activity has experienced considerable growth in this recovery, the experience varies widely among different types of industries wherein the industries are broken down between durable and nondurable goods. It can be said that manufacturing remains an important and vital part of the economy, and that changes in overall economic activity go hand in hand with changes in manufacturing activity.

What is the relationship between trade and economic growth? Does trade positively affect economic growth? Owing to the ambiguity of this relationship, the empirical relationship has remained open ( Rodriguez and Rodrik, 2001 ; Baldwin, 2003 ). This paper introduces “trade structure” variables, borrowed from the paper of Lederman and Maloney (2003 ), and applies them to the relationship. A dynamic panel estimation for the data of 66 countries during 1991–2004 is used to verify the validity and robustness of the relationship. Trade structure variables show strong evidence of positive effects on growth. Free-trade agreements/areas (FTAs) also enhance economic growth. East Asia shows a different relationship between trade and growth than the world and reflects a weaker role of FTAs in its growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines some economic forecasts made in late 1930 that were intended to predict economic activity in the United States in order to shed light on several methodological issues. We document that these forecasts were extremely optimistic, predicting that the recession in the US would soon end, and that 1931 would show a recovery. These forecasts displayed egregious errors, because 1931 witnessed the largest negative growth rate for the US economy in any year in the twentieth century. A specific question is what led forecasters to make such serious and substantial empirical errors. A second more general issue involves the methodology of forecasting. The 1930 forecasts were sometimes based on explicit analogies with previous serious business cycles. Modern forecasting approaches are based on techniques that may not be recognized as analogies. Using the 1930 forecasts, we examine the implicit‐analogy content of forecasts, and what might render such implicit analogies valid or invalid. This 1930 forecast example also resonates beyond the confines of economic methodology because forecasts about the Great Depression are of continuing interest to the profession at large, and we produce a forecast series not previously available. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After World War II, the American university emerged as a world leader in higher education. Economic development became a dominant value and its subsequent material success has been unrivaled. Many developing countries adopted characteristics of the model with the expectation that national economic growth would follow. Yet it has also been described as a lawless and confused conglomerate of competing interests with no common or unifying principle to tie the pieces together. It is made up of many cultures and seeks to accommodate all, but knows little about its own or others. The study of history and cultures in higher education has been marginalized because it is viewed as divisive. This paper focuses on five pivotal ideas that provide some explanation of the status of the modern American university and its current disorders. Each of these ideas has to do with truth and freedom, fundamental characteristics of the university. Three came to America from Europe and two were forged uniquely in the American experience. They explain changes in the concepts of truth and freedom and how politics and economics emerged as dominant values in the university. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thoughtful economists have long been aware of the limitations of national accounting and GDP in measuring economic activity and material well-being. Feminist economists criticize the failure to count women's unpaid and reproductive work in measures of economic production. This paper examines the treatment of human milk production in national accounting guidelines. Human milk is an important resource produced by women. Significant maternal and child health costs result from children's premature weaning onto formula or solid food. While human milk production meets the standard national accounting criteria for inclusion in GDP, current practice is to ignore its significant economic value and the substantial private and public health costs of commercial breastmilk substitutes. Economic output measures such as GDP thus are incomplete and biased estimates of national food production and overall economic output, and they distort policy priorities to the disadvantage of women and children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses a financial framework for economic growth in the United States. The article presents a unified financial counterpart to a long-term economic projection. Based on assumptions of varying rates of growth, a set of projections of economic activity in 1970 is presented. A "judgment" model will be selected based on the results of the projections. The article then introduces a theoretical framework that links levels of economic and financial activity. By using the "judgment" model as a reference, the pattern of relationships will be applied to a projection of assets and liabilities for the individual components of the financial network.

While most cross-country studies find a negative relationship between income inequality and economic growth, studies that use panel data suggest the presence of a positive relationship between inequality and growth. This paper uses a cross-state panel for the United States to assess the relationship between inequality and growth. Using both standard fixed effects and GMM estimations, this paper does not find evidence of a positive relationship between inequality and growth but finds some evidence in support of a negative relationship between inequality and growth. The paper, however, shows that the relationship between inequality and growth is not robust and that small differences in the method used to measure inequality can result in large differences in the estimated relationship between inequality and growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes an empirical study of the implications of agents' heterogeneity for theories of macroeconomic fluctuations based on the role of financial variables. Models of explicit distribution dynamics are applied to company account data from a panel of US manufacturing firms to investigate the dynamics of the entire cross-section distribution of firms' financial positions and the interactions with aggregate activity. It is found that the pattern of cyclical co-movements is consistent with models where aggregate fluctuations are endogenously and jointly determined with financial conditions. The dynamics of different parts of the leverage distribution contain significant predictive information for aggregate investment growth. The distribution dynamics reveal substantial intra-distribution mobility, although there is little evidence of significant interactions with aggregate economic activity. Intra-distribution mobility is higher for small firms than for large firms, and displays asymmetric patterns across business cycle phases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) was designed to reveal the economic, social, and environmental trade-offs associated with conventional economic growth as traditionally measured by Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Although originally designed for use at the national scale, an interest has developed in the United States in a state-level uptake of the GPI to inform and guide policy. This study presents the first fifty-state estimate for U.S. GPI in order to address questions over its design, implementation, and ultimate potential as a tool to guide state-level economic policy. Following a review of the current state of analysis and critique of GPI, we provide an overview of methodology and database development. Results are then presented, including discussion of lessons learned through a fifty-state application. The paper concludes with suggestions for further research and next steps to consolidating a consistent methodology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article comments on a paper which evaluated the challenges of designing short- and medium-run monetary policy for controlling inflation in the U.S. Anticipatory monetary policy was not universally popular or understood. A number of people asked how the U.S. Federal Reserve could be confident that inflation would have accelerated in the absence of tightening. Moreover, this was not the first time policy actions had been taken in advance of economic developments. For instance, short-term rates were raised in 1984 while unemployment was still elevated, helping to prolong the expansion. More recently, the U.S. Federal Reserve eased policy in 1989 when economic activity softened even as inflation was relatively high and rising. This comment focused on the problems encountered by the study's author, Stephen Cecchetti, in which he predicted future inflation by adding one indicator to past inflation. These tests suffered from a lack of consideration of structural issues. Indicator exercises by their nature submerge the fundamental behavior relationships among economic and financial variables. In addition, even some of the indicator variables themselves seem not to have been specified with close regard for a sense of the underlying structure of the economy or theory that might link the indicator to inflation.

For most of the 1980s the New York City economy surged, carrying its expensive municipal government along with it. the fiscal crisis of the middle 1970s had become a nearly forgotten product of fiscal mismanagement and the death throes of the industrial economy. The city framed its budget according to accepted accounting principles and with its newly achieved satisfactory bond rating, it could once again market its general obligation bonds. New York's restructured economy, based in finance and advanced services, reaffirmed its enhanced status as global city. Then, just as rapidly as the boom began, it ended. The 1987 stock market crash constituted the first harbinger of decline, nevertheless New York's economy continued to grow for the next two years, albeit at a slower pace. By the end of 1989, however, almost all indicators had turned down and for the years 1990 and 19991 New York City showed declines in employment, a virtually total real-estate slump and a drastic shortfall in tax revenues as compared to anticipated receipts. The paper examines the causes and outcomes of the two post-1970 fiscal crises to indicate the links between New York's economic base, the financial condition of its government, its politics and the way in which these factors intertwine.

Although personal income data for states are available on a timely basis, a comprehensive and timely measure of economic growth for cities does not exist. This paper develops a methodology for estimating current metropolitan area earnings by weighting the BLS metropolitan-area monthly job data by the most recently available BEA industry earnings data. The earnings-weighted job data are then used to construct an economic performance index to compare economic growth among metropolitan areas. To illustrate, we construct the index for the 75 largest U.S. metropolitan areas for the first quarter of 1990. We also examine metropolitan economic growth for the year 1989 and show how our index compares to simple job growth and personal income growth. Finally, earnings-weighted shift-share analysis is developed as a way of further examining the components of growth in a city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A new frame work to measure the impact of an increase in government expenditure and/or money supply on unemployment is provided. The model and procedures introduced are used to estimate a long-run aggregate demand function for the US economy.
Recently many investigators have attempted to test the impact of an increase in government expenditure and/or money supply on economic growth in different countries. Unfortunately, to date, they have used statistical models which impose arbitrary a priori assumptions about the functional form for this purpose (see Section II).
This paper proposes a new approach that explicitly tests the functional form of the long-run aggregate demand function for the US using annual time-series data, 1890-1980, and appropriate maximum likelihood procedures. It is hoped that the estimates will provide new and fresh evidence to the debate over the appropriate statistical framework which should be used to estimate such aggregate demand functions and help to resolve the Monetarist vs Keynesian controversy on the role of monetary and fiscal policies in aggregate demand management.
The outline of the paper is as follows. In Section II the model and data used are discussed. Section III presents and analyses the results obtained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a paper on economic-demographic interactions and long swings in economic growth. The paper building on the work of numerous predecessors, suggests that one of the mechanisms responsible for long swings in economic growth may involve interactions among aggregate demand, labor-market conditions, and household growth, with a feedback effect from the last to the first. An upswing in the growth of aggregate demand and the growing labor-market tightness induced thereby engenders accelerated marriage, migration, and household growth. These are critical decision points in the life cycle, entailing spending commitments extending over several years as a new home is established and a family started or settled. In effect, such commitments are geared to a notion of permanent income and thus tend to be relatively insensitive to short term income changes. A bunching of such commitments serves to cushion the economy against the usual business cycle and becomes exhausted only gradually. Such a bunching of long term spending commitments may be the key to Kuznets cycle phenomena.

The article focuses on aggregate production functions and medium-range growth projections in the U.S. The conceptual basis for believing in the existence of a simple and stable relationship between a measure of aggregate inputs and a measure of aggregate output is uncertain at best. Yet an aggregate production function is a very convenient tool for theoretically exploring some determinants of economic growth; and it has served as a framework for some interesting empirical studies. Moreover, in an attempt to assess the growth prospects for an economy, to identify variables that are likely to determine the growth rate and to examine policies affecting growth, the explicit or implicit use of an aggregate production function is almost indispensable. In recent years, economists have developed a variety of aggregate production functions. Several of these models are quite similar in basic conception but focus on different variables or make different assumptions about the interrelationships of variables. The purpose of this paper is to try to place several of these models within a general framework so that their assumptions and implications can be compared and evaluated.

This paper considers the allocation of national technological resources to different sectors of the economy. The impact of economic investments in technology is related to national, industry, and company growth. In some sectors of the economy investments in research and development (R and D) are well below the saturation level, where increasing the investment level and fraction of scientific and engineering manpower devoted to R and D may be expected to yield increased economic growth. A comparison is made of the sources and consumers of R and D funds in the U. S. and Israel, particularly as related to size of firms. Conclusions are obtained in the form of magnitude and allocation of R and D investments and utilization of scientific and engineering manpower for industrial R and D in Israel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The controversial Rahn Curve is the relation of government spending with economic growth. It is argued that government spending is inefficient and should therefore be negatively related or uncorrelated with the growth of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Whether there is a Rahn Curve is an empirical question which has been examined with mixed results for the U.S. economy. There has been little effort to disaggregate federal expenditures to see if there are components which are highly correlated with economic growth. However, some components of government spending which are theoretically related to economic growth, e.g., social security, funding of research grants, infrastructure building, and education. On the other hand, other expenditures such as debt service, police protection, even military spending does much to aid GDP growth. This paper uses components of federal expenditures as the explanatory variable for GDP growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Because of large acreages, sparse populations, and distinct sociopolitical dynamics, many rural communities are beginning to assemble their own sets of economic indicators to fit unique policy agendas. This review summarizes over 30 years of practical efforts from six regions that created economic development reports. Reports cover 60% of the nonmetro counties in the United States. Over half the reports were issued in the last 5 years. To understand distinctions between scholarly efforts and how communities leverage publicly available data sets toward policy objectives, the authors compare the rural, regional economic development reports assembled through community partnerships with indicators recommended in rural wealth creation literature. The authors identify a gap in scholarship and practice with implications for how practitioners and researchers conceptualize the creation of wealth in rural areas and conclude with best-practice approaches to co-creating rural economic indicator reports, especially where data can be tailored precisely to rural areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The analysis of synchronization among regional or national business cycles has recently been attracting a growing interest within the economic literature. Far less attention has instead been devoted to a closely related issue: given a certain level of synchronization, some economies might be systematically ahead of others along the swings of the business cycle. We analyze this issue within a system of economies and show that leading (or lagging behind) is a feature that does not occur at random across the economies. In addition, we investigate the economic drivers that could explain this behavior. To do so, we employ data for 48 conterminous US states between 1990 and 2009. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A semi-empirical endogenous growth theory was proposed by the authors in 2005. It is based on a model of the economy as a two-stage materials/energy processing system. Growth is simulated by a two-parameter production function with two traditional factors, labor and capital, and a non-traditional factor, namely ‘useful work’. The non-traditional factor is calculated from primary energy inputs multiplied by an empirically estimated average energy conversion efficiency, which is a function of changing technology over time. This model ‘explains’ past US growth from 1900 through 1973–74 with satisfactory accuracy but it slightly underestimates subsequent growth (i.e. it leaves a small unexplained but increasing residual) for the period after 1975. However, by subdividing capital stock into traditional and ICT components, we are able to extend the theory to explain US economic growth accurately. In this paper we also extend the results to Japan. The revised production function has only three independent parameters. The new model also has implications for future economic growth, energy and environmental policy that differ significantly from the traditional growth theory. These implications are discussed briefly. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The article offers information on the study regarding the effect of recent tax changes on taxable income in the U.S. The elasticity of taxable income to the net-of-tax share has been estimated using a random sample of taxpayers taken from the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 and the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003 tax changes. It is found that the elasticity of taxable income to the year 2008's net-of-tax share lies between 0.3 and 0.4 overall. The elasticity of a broader measure of income falls between 0.1 and 0.2 overall.

Summary: This paper first reviews the debate on the definition of pro-poor growth and argues that a relative definition has merits when defining the state of pro-poor growth, while an absolute definition is most suitable when analyzing the rate of pro-poor growth. The second contribution is to extend the pro-poor growth toolbox to non-income indicators. The analysis, applied to Bolivia, shows that this extension greatly improves our understanding of the distribution of change in non-income indicators, of the linkages between progress in income and non-income dimensions of poverty, and on the incidence of progress in non-income outcomes along the income distribution. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This article provides a broad overview of the measurement techniques used in estimating GDP and the national accounts in the United States. In the United States, the GDP and the national accounts estimates are fundamentally based on detailed economic census data and other information that is available only once every five years. The challenge lies in developing a framework and methods that take these economic census data and combine them using a mosaic of monthly, quarterly, and annual economic indicators to produce quarterly and annual GDP estimates. One problem is that the other economic indicators that are used to extrapolate GDP in between the five-year economic census data—such as retail sales, housing starts, and manufacturers shipments of capital goods— are often collected for purposes other than estimating GDP and may embody definitions that differ from those used in the national accounts. Another problem is some data are simply not available for the earlier estimates in the reporting process. For the initial monthly estimates of GDP, data on about 25 percent of GDP—especially in the service sector—are not available, and so these sectors of the economy are estimated based on past trends and whatever related data are available. The initial monthly GDP estimates based on these extrapolations are revised as more complete data become available In producing the national accounts estimates, the Bureau of Economic Analysis attempts to strike a balance between accuracy and timeliness so that the estimates can be used to monitor real overall economic growth and inflation, as well as major sectors of interest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The article provides information concerning the research works of World Bank in the U.S. Research is on e of the important activities of the World Bank and an essential input to lending. The author implies that the Bank must combine the power of ideas and knowledge with finance to meet the challenges of development and poverty reduction. Research findings are used in the advisory services of the Bank which include policy dialogue with governments, analytical reports, and technical assistance. World Bank lending provides opportunities for learning about development.

This paper compares the long-term (1970-2002) rates of real growth in health spending per capita in the United States and a group of high-income countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Real health spending growth is decomposed into population aging, overall economic growth, and excess growth. Although rates of aging and overall economic growth were similar, annual excess growth was much higher in the United States (2.0 percent) versus the OECD countries studied (1.1 percent). That difference, which is of an economically important magnitude, suggests that country-specific institutional factors might contribute to long-term health spending trends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the study on the economic growth and development in the U.S. Many economists and international organizations argue that investment in education is a policy priority. Recently, some studies have provided more reliable findings on specific policies and programs. This article examines this recent work in detail. The article, therefore offers three objectives which is to review the literature on the relationship between school and teacher characteristics, and the acquisition of cognitive skills, to examine the relationship between schooling and labor productivity, and to investigate the relationship between cognitive skills and socioeconomic outcomes other than labor productivity. A final section summarizes the findings and provides recommendations for future research.

This paper estimates dynamic effects of public capital on output per capita. Based on an open economy growth model, I derive a version of the income convergence equation augmented with public capital. This equation is estimated using panel data of United States and Japanese regions. Sensible results are obtained when public capital is disaggregated into components. In both countries, the infrastructure component of public capital turns out to have significantly positive effects. The implied elasticity of output with respect to infrastructure is somewhere around 0.1 to 0.15. This suggests a modest contribution of infrastructure to postwar growth of the two countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We explore the role of social mobility as a driver of economic development by constructing a panel data set that includes measures of intergenerational mobility of education at the sub-national level in Latin America. First, we map the geography of educational mobility for 52 Latin American regions, as well as its evolution over time. Then, through a novel weighting procedure that considers the participation of cohorts to the economy in each year, we estimate the effect of changes in mobility on economic indicators, such as income per capita, poverty, child mortality, and luminosity. Hereby, we control for several covariates, including migration, educational expansions, initial conditions, and unobserved cross-regional heterogeneity. Our findings show that increasing social mobility had a significant and robust impact on the development of Latin American regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A water user participating in a political process generally has to actively interact with an agent of the state when applying for water permits and water. The interaction involves contact with such agents, and possibly with other water users. Conflict could easily arise due to differing beliefs and attitudes. For example, agents of the state may assert that economic growth could destroy the aquifer (belief) and that the aquifer should be protected from destruction (attitude), suggesting a high evaluation (value) on preserving the aquifer's ability to produce water. The applicant may believe the same rate of pumping will not affect the aquifer enough to justify slowing economic growth (belief), and that at least some of the aquifer should be destroyed to insure enough economic growth (attitude). Considerable time, money, and effort may have to be expended to overcome the conflict resulting from the differing behavior, which arises from the differing beliefs and attitudes. As a result, transactions costs could be relatively high. The behavior of the agent and the applicant in any institutional setting becomes an empirical question because behavior will differ with each type of institution (laws, rules, regulations, customs, habits). We are using the term as Bromley (1989, 39) suggests, by focusing our attention on the "concept of institutions as the rules and conventions that define the choice sets from which individuals, firms, households, and other decision-making units choose courses of action." In particular, we are focusing here on the 1972 Florida Water Resources Act and the resulting administrative law and rules in place that guide the process for obtaining a consumptive use permit (CUP). The Act influences the choice sets, and thus the behavior, of both the applicant and the agents in Florida's water management districts. This paper develops a model for first improving understanding and then explaining the behavior of a water management district and of the applicants for water permits in the Southwest Florida Water Management District as a case study. We first describe the pattern and highlight the major themes of the Act and the subsequent rules and regulations which form the basic structure for the permitting process. We then describe the permitting: the act puts in place a unique process that necessitates applicants incurring more transaction costs to obtain more water. A "friction" model is proposed, with the dependent variable a measure of the success at getting more water by irrigators. The model suggests the extent to which over-requests, at a level beyond some threshold, will be honored by the district. We posit that greater differences in beliefs and attitudes between the applicant and the water management district staff! governing board cause the applicant to request a significantly greater amount of water than the district perceives is needed. We suggest a threshold level, however, below which over-requests are honored, probably to avoid conflict. Beyond the threshold level, then, belief and attitude differences cause conflict. Also, beyond the threshold we propose the irrigator can be successful with more expenditure of time, money, and effort used to overcome the conflict. We suggest behavior can only be understood by examining the underlying institutional structure and the processes encouraged by that structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Metropolitan communities in the United States are interdependent. Each metropolis serves the economy through its key functions while at the same time it depends on other metropolises and systems for some of its own needs. Using 1960 data for SMSAs, this paper demonstrates that a community's position in this differentiated system influences the characteristics of its population. Two perspectives for determining a metropolitan community's key functions are used: one considers economic activities one at a time; the other considers the entire configuration of these activities at once. These two procedures are compared in their ability to identify groups of communities having distinctive social structures, as indicated by occupational and educational composition, income level, age and sex structure, and ability to attract and hold migrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been much concern recently that large U.S. deficits have, or will soon, produce high interest rates, thus hindering capital formation and economic growth in the U.S. and the rest of the world. In this paper, the author surveys U.S. history to determine whether this concern has merit. There are three periods during which the federal deficit has exceeded 10 percent of national income. In none of these periods did interest rates rise appreciably. Regression analysis applied to data from these three periods has not uncovered a positive association between deficits and interest rates. Economists like to think of economics as a science. In a science, repeated contradictions of a paradigm lead to its abandonment if there is any sensible alternative. One paradigm in economics implies that large deficits produce high interest rates. This paradigm is not supported by the facts. In over a century of U.S. history, large deficits have never been associated with high interest rates. Even the postwar periods separately offer no support for a positive association between deficits and interest rates. Indeed, the evidence more strongly supports a negative association than a positive one. Therefore, it seems that economists should be looking for an alternative paradigm to replace their current one.

This article presents a study in economics about the capital market and the dynamics of growth in the U.S. It investigated the effects of introducing an equity security into a money and growth framework. The model was developed explicitly in terms of securities and capital instead of the more traditional treatment in terms of money and capital. The model was reduced to three differential equations in capital intensity, the wealth ratio, and price expectations. Based on the reduced system, equilibrium and global stability were analyzed. The stability of the model was found to depend crucially on whether the direct interest rate effect was greater than the offsetting wealth effect and whether the rate of forced saving was greater than the adjustment in the rate of inflation. It is proposed that the crucial role of financial markets in general, and security markets in particular, is to take the short-run impact of economic disturbances and allow the rate of inflation to adjust slowly to changes in the economic environment.

Abstract--Both the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and the Board of Governors maintain separate monetary base series. Because of differing adjustment procedures to account for changes in reserve requirements, these series may not be used interchangeably. Using non-nested testing procedures, the two measures are compared in terms of their ability to explain quarterly growth rates of nominal GNP. The evidence presented in this paper indeed rejects the notion that one can interchange these two measures. Rather, our findings suggest that the St. Louis base measure is superior in explaining nominal GNP growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article classifies the role of speculators in economic activity of the U.S. Most noneconomists would probably argue that speculation is socially undesirable for two reasons. First, speculation increases uncertainty about the future by creating disturbances and fluctuations in the economy. Second, by engaging in speculative activity, traders who exert an important influence in a market may be able to make profits at the expense of smaller traders who are not primarily involved in the market for speculative purposes.

Factors affecting the dynamics of income inequality in the US during the 1948-92 period are examined. Specifically, it extends the work of Maxwell, who found that through-time changes in family income inequality are related to demographic and industry factors, and draws upon the insights of other researchers who have recognized that the US national economy is actually a composite of semi-autonomous regional economies. The results provide strong evidence that family income inequality is related to the pattern of regional economic growth and the relative proportion of unmarried families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The primary purpose of this paper is to show, however, that AREEP models are misspecified because of an inadequate representation of uncertainty in these models. Consider, for example, the error term 蝱 N(0; σ 2ε) in Equation 3. Except for Lucas (1973) and Barro (1976) AREEP models pay little or no attention to the variance of the error term σ 2ε. Most AREEP results are derived by focusing on the zero mean characteristic of the distribution of error terms. Even if economic agents were equally successful on average by making unbiased estimates of the inflation rate in two different periods, their overall behaviour may be significantly different if the variance of this error σ 2ε was significantly different. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the last decade the major international agencies have forecast the possibilities for the world economy. This paper reviews these efforts. It finds that the forecasts of the agencies for the economic growth rates of the industrial and developing countries have been systematically biased, while their estimates of the locomotive effect for developing countries have become ambiguous. There has also been a systematic shift in the forecasting methods used by the agencies. In part, this pattern reflects the need to rationalize forecasts within the context of a particular theoretical-ideological perspective, increasingly strengthened by the influence of the present United States administration. Peer group and institutional pressures within the interagency system have resulted in a misplaced consensus about long-term trends, and have undermined the potential benefits of the forecasting exercise. The dangers of biased or unreliable forecasts are evident, given the influence of the forecasts on the planning activities and the style of development of so many developing countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]